Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez gets to the very core of why the Justice Department’s decision to drop its case against the New Black Panthers’–a case which was already “won”–was so contemptible: it was a naked abuse of power. It is as if Obama’s Justice Department wanted to send the message that it’s OK for the Panthers and other union thugs to do more of the same (or worse) in subsequent elections, in even more polling places. They are in effect saying: if you do are doing this on Obama’s behalf nothing will happen to you; “all the Animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others…”

This action is something you would expect out of Hugo Chavez or Castro, but not from an American President. Taken to an extreme, such a scenario would call to memory the tactics of the Brownshirts and the Blackshirts of the 30’s:

The salient thing about J. Christian Adams’s accusation that the Obama administration deliberately let off the New Black Panther Party after it engaged in voter intimidation is that, if true, it constitutes a pure exercise in the abuse of power. The other wrongs it represents — the perversion of the electoral process, the violation of civil rights — are secondary. The most serious allegation in the whole affair is that the certain officials countenanced a crime because they wanted to. The most concentrated expression of tyranny is malice in the service of caprice.

Adams was a Department of Justice lawyer who resigned in disgust after “we were ordered to dismiss the case. I mean we were told drop the charges against the New Black Panther Party. It’s the easiest case I ever had at the Justice Department. It doesn’t get any easier than this. If this doesn’t constitute voter intimidation, nothing will. .. ”

I keep thinking back to the last election and those Che posters at Obama HQ in Houston…